The present invention relates to a simultaneous communication (or multi-destination delivery) method and system for transmitting the same data to a plurality of terminal devices simultaneously, and more particularly to such a method and system which has a retransmission function and is suitable for transmission of a large amount of consecutive identical information at a high speed in a local network by which a plurality of devices, including microcomputers or the like, are interconnected with each other.
It is generally known that the sending of an acknowledgement in response to conventional simultaneous communication is carried out for each data block between a transmitter node and a plurality of receiver nodes or between the transmitter node and a node which is representative of a plurality of receiver nodes. An example of the latter technique is disclosed in JP-A-No. 59-167155.
A method in which a controller as a transmitter node awaits and acknowledgement from each terminal device serving as a receiver node in response to each transmission of one data block is effective against noise or and unfavorable environment in the case where the quality of a transmission circuit line is low. However, under more current conditions in which the quality of the transmission circuit line is very high, as experienced in recent years, such a method requires an extremely long wait time for receipt of the acknowledgement in transmitting a large amount of data, thereby making high speed communication difficult.